The Hungry Years

New perspectives on Chairman Mao’s Great Famine.

A workers’ delegation marching in Gansu province, during the Great Leap Forward.Credit Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum

Between 1876 and 1879, in North China, as many as thirteen million people died in what came to be called the Incredible Famine. It was one of many calamities around the world during that decade which were caused by extreme weather. However, according to the British-owned North China Herald, an influential mouthpiece of the Western business communities clustered in Shanghai, the famine was proof of the folly of big government—the Qing imperial administration, in this instance. A fatal Chinese indifference to science, to railroads, and, most important, to laissez-faire economics was to blame. The famine and the many deaths in China would not have occurred “in vain,” the Herald editorialized, if they could persuade the Chinese government to cease its paternalistic interfering in the laws of “private enterprise.”

Never mind that more than twelve million people had died during the Madras Famine of 1877, even though India had been equipped by its British rulers with railroads and a free market in grains, or that Ireland, during the Great Potato Famine, thirty years earlier, had suffered from Britain’s heartlessly enforced ideology of laissez-faire. The Herald deplored the “antiquated learning” of the Chinese, and described the heroic figure who could rescue China from misery: “The man wanted in China now, as in its early days, is a patriotic engineer,” someone “single-minded and energetic” and possessing “commanding energy and resolution.”

In due course, China got just such a big-thinking, single-minded “patriotic engineer.” His name was Mao Zedong, and his uneducated infatuation with the signs and symbols of modern progress—gigantic projects and economic statistics—caused a famine that dwarfed even the Incredible Famine. The Great Famine of 1958-62 is thought to have taken more than thirty million lives, and perhaps as many as forty-five million. Two new books use fresh evidence to describe the stubborn delusions and cruelties of the man who believed that, among other things, hundreds of millions of Chinese making steel in their back-yard furnaces could surpass the industrial production of Western countries. “Tombstone,” by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is the first major Chinese account of the causes and consequences of that famine. “Mao: The Real Story,” by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine (Simon & Schuster), draws on Russian archives to show, more clearly than before, that this apparently unparalleled tale of cruel folly was not without precedent in the twentieth century—the age of ideological excess.

The Soviet Union was the first among many “underdeveloped” countries in which national leaders with pseudo-scientific visions of socioeconomic engineering exposed their societies to immense suffering. In the early nineteen-twenties, the Bolsheviks, emerging from a destructive civil war and an invasion by Western countries, urgently wanted to industrialize their country, as the first step to Communism. In the absence of any foreign investment, industrialization depended on generating adequate capital from agricultural surpluses, and the Bolsheviks initially experimented, partly successfully, with free-market agriculture and private ownership. In 1929, however, Stalin decided to speed up the Soviet Union’s tryst with industrial power, by forcing peasants into collective farms. Those who resisted—for instance, by slaughtering livestock or by refusing to plant or harvest grain—were ruthlessly crushed. The toll in human suffering was enormous—millions of peasants, many of them in Ukraine, were killed or starved to death. By the mid-thirties, the Stalinists had won. Collective farms became a permanent feature of Soviet life, and the Soviet Union became an industrialized country. Its seemingly limitless ability to produce the military hardware necessary to fight—and win—its ferocious war with Nazi Germany was a testament to its success.

Few people in China in the nineteen-twenties and thirties observed Stalin’s brutal but efficacious engineering more closely than Mao Zedong, then a restless young convert to Communism. Like many Chinese picking their way through the ruins of the Qing Empire, Mao was convinced that China had to transform itself, as the Soviet Union had done, into a powerful nation-state in order to survive the hostility of the capitalist-imperialist West. In this project, the Soviet Union was the indispensable nation, first as fraternal pioneer and then as ideological foil. Pantsov and Levine’s examination of Russian archives reveals that the Chinese Communist Party, from its inception, in 1921, was deeply dependent on Soviet money, expertise, and ideological guidance. It also shows, in absorbing detail, how Mao’s catastrophic “concept of a special Chinese path of development,” as Pantsov and Levine assert, “could arise only in the post-Stalin environment.”

In 1949, Mao achieved victory in the drawn-out civil war against the Nationalists, who were backed by the Americans and led by Chiang Kai-shek, and he began the “Stalinization” of China soon afterward. He used the Stalinist tool kit—coercion and propaganda—to build a strong state upheld by a single party, a loyal military, and intrusive micromanagement of the lives of the citizens. Henceforth, the Chinese were told where to live, work, and study, and how many children to have. The Soviets offered models for everything, from urban planning to labor camps and physical-fitness drills. And Soviet experts were on hand to supervise, as Mao instituted land reforms, abolished private property, silenced intellectual critics, segregated rural and urban populations, and launched Stalinist-style purges against counter-revolutionaries and rich peasants.

As in the Soviet Union, Chinese leaders had to raise capital through increased agricultural yields before they could start investing in extensive industrialization. However, unlike Stalin, Mao faced relatively little resistance to his program of collectivization. Furthermore, the first modernizing attempts of the People’s Republic of China were strikingly successful. Industrial and agricultural production soared—the annual growth rate in the early nineteen-fifties was almost eighteen per cent. The Party acquired a popular base in the countryside among peasant beneficiaries of land reforms. (Affection for Mao among the rural population was one reason for the strange lack of public disaffection when the famine came.) The social climate improved, thanks to mass campaigns against prostitution, arranged marriages, and opium use. Expanding literacy and health care gave China an early and enduring lead over other post-colonial countries, including India.

But China’s “patriotic engineer” was not content, telling his personal physician, “When I say, ‘Learn from the Soviet Union,’ we don’t have to learn how to shit and piss from the Soviet Union, too, do we?” Mao was intellectually insecure, having risen to power only after long and bitter struggles with better-educated, Soviet-backed Party leaders; he had always resented the unbalanced and yet unavoidable Chinese relationship with the Soviet Union. Stalin’s death, in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin, in 1956, helped Mao finally break free of his dependency. Socialism in China, as he saw it, was to be “more, better, faster” than even Stalin could imagine. Using the country’s great advantage—cheap and abundant labor—China would make the Great Leap Forward, doubling, even tripling, agricultural and industrial production in a few years.

As Pantsov and Levine point out, “Mao had no concrete plans for the Great Leap Forward.” All he did was repeat the incantation “We can catch up with England in fifteen years.” In fact, as Yang Jisheng’s “Tombstone” shows, neither experts nor the Central Committee discussed “Mao’s grand plan.” The Chinese President and Mao cultist Liu Shaoqi endorsed it, and a boastful fantasy became, as Yang writes, “the guiding ideology of the party and the country.”

A hundred absurd schemes, such as close planting of seeds for better yields, now flowered, as loudspeakers boomed out the song “We Will Overtake England and Catch Up to America.” Mao constantly looked for ways to productively deploy the world’s biggest national population: farmers were taken out of fields and sent to work building reservoirs and irrigation channels, digging wells, and dredging river bottoms. Yang points out that, since these projects “were undertaken with an unscientific approach, many were a waste of manpower and resources.” But there was no dearth of sycophantic officials ready to run with Mao’s vaguest commands, among them Liu Shaoqi. Visiting a commune in 1958, Liu swallowed the claims by local officials that irrigating yam fields with dog-meat broth increased agricultural output. “You should start raising dogs, then,” he told them. “Dogs are very easy to breed.” Liu also became an instant expert on close planting, suggesting that peasants use tweezers for weeding the seedlings.

The disaster that unfolded closely followed the ghastly precedent set by the Soviet Union. Under the experiment known as “people’s communes,” the rural population was deprived of its land, tools, grain, and even cooking utensils, and was forced to eat at communal kitchens. Yang calls the system “the organizational foundation for the Great Famine.” Mao’s plan of herding everyone into collectives not only destroyed the immemorial bonds of the family; it made people who traditionally used their private land to grow food, secure loans, and generate capital helplessly dependent on an increasingly maladroit and callous state.

Ill-conceived projects such as back-yard steelmaking took peasants away from the fields, causing a steep decline in agricultural productivity. Led, and often coerced, by overzealous Party officials, the new rural communes reported fake harvests to meet Beijing’s demand for record grain output, and the government began to procure grain based on these exaggerated figures. Soon, the government granaries were full—indeed, China was a net exporter of grain throughout the whole period of the famine—but most people in rural areas found themselves with little to eat. Peasants working on irrigation projects fared no better: they were “treated as slaves,” Yang writes, “and hunger exacerbated by arduous labor caused many to die.” Those who resisted or were too weak to work were beaten and tortured by Party cadres, often to death.

Yang Jisheng’s father was one of the tens of millions who died of starvation. Yang’s book is a delayed homage, an enduring “tombstone in my heart,” from a son whose grief over his father’s death did not diminish his loyalty to the Party; Yang even extolled the Great Leap Forward in a newspaper that he edited at school. Studying at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University as the Cultural Revolution began, Yang came to know about other casualties of the famine. His political education deepened during thirty-five years as a reporter for the official news agency Xinhua, when he reported covertly—a role often required of senior Chinese journalists—to leaders in Beijing on such sensitive subjects as official corruption and impunity. But, according to Yang, it was not until the killings of unarmed protesters near Tiananmen Square, in 1989, that he was cleansed “of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades.”

One of Yang’s most compelling case studies is of Xinyang, a city in Henan province, where a million people out of a population of more than eight million were victims of Maoist experimentation. Here, as in many parts of China, exaggerated reports of harvests and aggressive procurements of grain by the state led to mass starvation. By the spring of 1960, according to one of Yang’s witnesses, corpses lay on the roads and in the fields, hardened by the winter cold and bent, often with holes in their buttocks and legs where flesh had been torn off. The survivors blamed dogs for the disfigurement. But the dogs had already been eaten. The truth was that many people that winter and the next survived by preying on the dead, sometimes even on their own family members.

The subject of the famine remains taboo in China; the official, absurdly generous, verdict on Mao’s record is that he was “70 percent correct, and 30 percent wrong.” Yang’s book, which inverts that anodyne ratio, is unlikely to be published in mainland China. (The Chinese-language edition was published in Hong Kong.) Yang had to investigate the Great Famine undercover, posing as a researcher of the history of China’s grain production. He was helped by an assortment of people—journalists with useful contacts, demographers who had taken big risks to keep accurate records, and provincial archivists keen to please an old comrade. Though the English translation is abridged, it is often overwhelming in its detail and analysis. Still, “Tombstone” easily supersedes all previous chronicles of the famine, and is one of the best insider accounts of the Party’s inner workings during this period, offering an unrivalled picture of socioeconomic engineering within a rigid ideological framework.

Apprised of the catastrophe in Xinyang, Mao blamed “counter-revolutionaries” and “ruthless class retaliation” by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (his old rivals, who were by then ensconced in Taiwan). Someone had to be punished, and though Mao balked at the death sentence—“I’ve never killed a county Party secretary,” he claimed—the officials responsible were imprisoned and persecuted. Yang denounces the outcome as “manifestly unjust”: local operatives were punished while the central government, which formulated and promoted the fatal policies, remained “correct and glorious.” Mao, much more than China’s leaders today, was the beneficiary of a widespread faith in the wisdom and the noble intentions of the central government. In “Tombstone,” Mao emerges as patriotic but megalomaniacal, crudely vindictive, and utterly inept. Yang is clear that Mao presided over a “totalitarian” system, but he avoids simpleminded Western presentations of Mao as the Oriental Hitler.

Yang is more interested in examining the defects within the political organization that produced the famine. He writes, “The great famine occurred within a system that produced incentives for local officials to exaggerate production while the state monopoly stifled incentives for increasing production.” Yang quotes the criticisms of many Party members, such as Bo Yibo (the father of Bo Xilai, the recently disgraced Party secretary of the city-province of Chongqing). Mao wasn’t entirely immune to self-doubt and periodically revealed himself to be a clear-sighted observer of the system’s debilities. In an internal Party communiqué in 1959, he admitted, “Much of the falsehood has been prompted by the upper levels through boasting, pressure, and reward, leaving little alternative to those below.”

“Tombstone” also presents fascinating instances in which local officials ignored or reversed orders from the central government, improvising policies of their own. In early 1961, Zeng Xisheng, the Party chief of Anhui province, who had condemned thousands to premature death in his zeal for high procurement targets, boldly overturned Mao’s collectivization project by contracting land to individual households. This commonsensical solution dawned on him after he heard of a seventy-three-year-old peasant who, with his tubercular son and using a single shovel, cultivated a plot of land in the mountains: after reaping an abundant harvest, the man sold his surplus grain to the state while also feeding himself. Mao encouraged Zeng to experiment with the so-called “responsibility fields.” “Give it a try,” he reportedly said. “If it doesn’t work, carry out self-criticism. If it works well . . . that will be splendid!”

Zeng’s experiment, which daringly contradicted Mao’s fantasy of collectivism, proved to be successful, and Anhui was among the first provinces to recover from the famine, in 1962. But by then Mao had been made insecure by the open acknowledgment of the Party’s policy errors by Liu Shaoqi and others. In early 1962, Liu, clearly striving for an acceptable ratio, described the famine as “three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made disaster.” Later that year, he had the temerity to inform the Chairman that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Mao, recoiling from such criticism, now wanted to assert his ideological infallibility and revert to the old method—the evidently true one of Communism.

Zeng ignored him, despite complaints from Maoists that he was engaged in “bourgeois restoration.” But, by the end of 1962, ideological pressures from above had curtailed his innovation. Later, like many Party officials responsible for mass suffering during the famine, Zeng was exposed to the fury of the Cultural Revolution’s victims. After brutal interrogation and public humiliation, he was put to death by young Red Guards. But there was another coda to his efforts. In 1978, Yang writes, as Deng Xiaoping ushered China into a market economy, “Anhui province took the lead in reinstating the responsibility fields, after which the practice spread throughout China.”

Yang’s meticulously researched book brings to light many such revealing details; they confirm his description of the Chinese Communist Party as being marked, from the fifties onward, by a battle between pragmatists and idealists (or, more accurately, ideologues), the latter represented by Mao’s faction. For Yang, this rough distinction also provides a useful way of explaining China’s post-Mao evolution. “The pragmatists salvaged the situation after Mao’s death,” he writes, “by pushing China into the road of ‘reform and opening.’ ”

Since the Maoist generation of Deng Xiaoping, a new generation of technocrats, almost all with engineering degrees, has come to the fore. Determined to avoid the “unscientific approach” of their predecessors and greatly influenced by the example of Singapore, these leaders have helped build the gigantic infrastructure—airports, highways, high-speed railroads—underpinning the country’s rapid economic growth. The rise of these technocrats and the corresponding eclipse of ideologues complicate the popular notion that China is a “totalitarian” state with no alternative but to transform itself into a democracy. “Tombstone” shows that, even during a catastrophe caused by a profoundly undemocratic system and a fanatical ideologue, the Party accommodated a degree of dissent, improvisation, and pragmatism. It makes you wonder about the opaque and little-understood one-party state now run by Mao’s heirs. How has it absorbed the lessons of Mao’s disasters? Yang’s account of the Chinese Communist Party (of which he remains a member) raises even more vital questions: How has China managed to retain many of the features of Mao’s regime—coercive public security, control of strategic industries, censorship and state propaganda mechanisms—while nonetheless transitioning to a market economy? And how long can a nominally Communist party maintain its right to rule over a largely capitalist country?

Certainly, the Party seems to have broken with Maoist mass campaigns and ideological indoctrination. Since the nineteen-eighties, it has sought to rebuild its legitimacy among a restless Chinese population by promising to bring prosperity through a market-driven economy. The Communist Party, once the domain of peasants and factory workers, now attracts rich businessmen and middle-class professionals, and it has suffered a corresponding loss of ideological coherence. Its leaders periodically announce, as they did in 2006, such grandiose projects as “building a socialist countryside.” But such old-fashioned rhetoric sounds hollow in a state where corrupt “princelings,” or sons of senior Party leaders, such as Bo Xilai, enrich themselves with impunity, while protests by the urban working classes and dispossessed peasants erupt across the country. The Chinese scholar Minxin Pei, in “China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy” (2006), summed up the orthodox wisdom, declaring that the technocratic regime now running China can “no longer build broad-based social coalitions to pursue its policies and defend itself.”

The logical way out of China’s impasse seems to be electoral democracy, and Yang, echoing the axioms of modernization theory, is convinced that the country’s market economy furnishes a solid basis for a “democratic political system.” But it is far from clear that either the Chinese beneficiaries of economic growth or its victims (displaced peasants and exploited urban workers) are ready to launch the political movement necessary for a shift to representative government.

The problems and challenges facing the Party, which has just undergone its once-a-decade leadership change, have tended to obscure its remarkable durability. Adapting rapidly to the age of private consumption, the Party no longer seeks to tightly control the personal lives of the Chinese people; it has a staggering eighty-three million members, ranging from hard-line Maoists and patriotic students to Shanghai bankers and critics such as Yang Jisheng. Neither the atrocity near Tiananmen Square and the worldwide collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 nor the reportedly tens of thousands of protests since then have much delayed China’s economic modernization. As Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, two scholars of Chinese politics, write in their introduction to the collection of essays “Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China” (2010), China, unlike the Soviet Union and many other Communist states, “not only survived the 1989 crisis with its party-state system intact”; it also managed, within a single generation, “to engineer an economic and social transformation of . . . stunning proportions.”

Heilmann and Perry counterintuitively argue that “much of the explanation for this singular achievement lies in the creative adaptation of key elements of China’s revolutionary heritage.” Apparently, policymaking for the technocrat rulers of today’s China is synonymous with endless change, improvisation, and ad-hoc adjustment—“guerrilla-style policy-making,” which is marked by “secrecy, versatility, speed, and surprise.”

Such pragmatism, which encourages “decentralized initiative within the framework of centralized political authority,” helps to explain phenomena that otherwise seem contradictory. On the one hand, there is the rise, in the nineteen-eighties, of the reformer Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Party, and for a time the presumed successor to Deng Xiaoping, who made several conciliatory gestures to the student protesters at Tiananmen Square; on the other, there is the surprisingly long run of Bo Xilai—who built a Maoist cult around himself and was apparently given a free hand to enact a series of “decentralized initiatives” along populist lines. But Chinese leaders since Mao, many of whom suffered during the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, also seek to insure themselves against excesses of ideology, personality cults, and populism. Thus, ad-hoc adjustments can include ruthlessly eliminating opponents for the sake of maintaining centralized political authority. Deng Xiaoping finally sent tanks to clear Tiananmen Square, and Zhao Ziyang, brusquely marginalized, spent the rest of his life—fifteen years—under house arrest. A much more severe punishment may await the stridently Maoist—but apparently brashly venal—Bo Xilai.

Other quick improvisations by the Chinese regime seem to include periodic and carefully controlled explosions of a near-xenophobic mass nationalism. Apparently condoned and even facilitated by Beijing, anti-Japanese riots and protests of the kind witnessed recently on Chinese streets act as release valves for politically disaffected masses. Although tainted by corruption scandals and beset by a slowing economy, Chinese leaders—men of uniformly sombre countenance and dyed hair—have not lost more conventional ways of securing their legitimacy among ordinary Chinese. As China watchers obsessively speculate about the fall of Bo Xilai and the rise of Xi Jinping, another princeling, who will be China’s next leader, the bigger, if less exciting, story coming out of the country, according to the Financial Times, is the apparent success of the “socialist countryside” campaign, an attempt to improve rural conditions. In 2006, the Chinese government abolished all agricultural levies (overturning two thousand years of precedent), and poured six trillion renminbi into infrastructure—nearly the same amount as Barack Obama’s stimulus package in 2009. The result is that ninety-five per cent of Chinese villages now have roads, electricity, running water, natural gas, and phone lines. Nearly all Chinese have basic health insurance, up from just thirty per cent in 2003.

From a Western perspective, the long ubiquity of Bo Xilai before his eventual disgrace indicates a deep rot within the Chinese political system. It is tempting to suppose that, like the despots of the Arab world, the Party’s leaders are unlikely to survive the inevitable revolution of rising expectations in a globalized economy. But it is equally possible that our preoccupation with the Party’s apparently fractious and corrupt senior leaders and the growing incidence of social unrest obscure the resilience of the Chinese one-party state—just as Western obsession with the poster-bright reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, in the nineteen-eighties, obscured the internal weakness of the Soviet Union. Certainly, the old view that consigns an aberrantly authoritarian China to the anteroom of Western-style democracy is up for reëxamination.

Yang Jisheng himself is deeply ambivalent about the prospects for democracy in China. He starts “Tombstone” by confidently declaring that the day of its arrival in China “will not be long in coming.” Five hundred pages later, he has changed his mind, asserting that “it will take a very long time.” Yang seems to be echoing the post-Mao Chinese élite’s wariness of impatient patriotic engineers in China; he warns that “the very people who are most radical and hasty in their opposition to autocracy may be the very ones who facilitate the rise of a new autocratic power.”

Yang has in mind the fate of Russia, where Boris Yeltsin, the nemesis of Soviet Communism, tried to rush an entire society toward democracy and the free market, only to pave the way for years of general impoverishment and suffering and for the return of authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. For many Chinese, the former Soviet Union embodies the perils of rash, top-down Westernization. And, as European and American leaders struggle to emerge from the free-market dogmas of recent years, the ostensibly Communist Chinese regime shuts down a radical Maoist challenger. Such are the ironies of the cautionary tales we tell ourselves about socioeconomic engineering. No doubt there will be more in our intensely ideological age. ♦